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Nov. 16, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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CLEAR THE FIELD Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep458
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Coming up, I'm going to talk about Trump's big announcement and its significance.
I think what he's trying to do is clear the field.
I'll reveal how redistricting and cash made a huge difference in protecting the Democrats in the midterms.
I I'm going to reflect on Josh Hawley's declaration that the old GOP is dead.
Is that true? And what's going to take its place?
And I'll share details from Catherine and Greg of True the Vote.
this is a Dinesh D'Souza show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Okay, he's in.
He's doing it. He's running for president.
Trump made his big announcement last night at Mar-a-Lago.
And, well, Debbie and I were invited, but we weren't there.
I had, well, I had the podcast.
I had my local Q&A, which is a live back and forth.
Very interesting. A lot of it focused on this topic and also on midterm results, where we go forward.
And then Debbie and I were like, hey, Trump is announcing right now.
Let's go watch.
So Danielle and Brandon were in the audience at Mar-a-Lago, but we were in our media room watching.
And of course, it was a little bit of deja vu.
We know that room. We know that atmosphere.
We were kind of scrolling through the audience to see if there were people we recognized.
And there were some... And yet, as Trump was talking, Debbie was like, man, this guy, you know, he's well into his 70s, and why does he do it?
What's motivating him?
You know, he gets so much attack, and the attacks are so vicious, and they're not going to stop.
And sure enough, in fact, this morning, I look on social media, and look at this.
This is from NPR. Breaking.
This is the headline. That's the headline.
And it just shows you really what clowns these people in the media are.
They're not even pretending to be neutral or unbiased.
I mean, you could think of it.
You could rewrite that headline like this.
In fact, this is Bruce Porter kind of quote-tweeting it, and he rewrites the headline.
Breaking. President Donald Trump, who is widely believed to have won 2020 election that was plagued with unverifiable mail-in ballots, untrustworthy electronic voting machines, and unexplained vote counting stoppage simultaneous across multiple states, has filed to run for president.
Think of it. If conservatives dominated the media, they could do this.
This would be the kind of...
And the point is not that this is a legitimate headline, but this is parodying the stupid headline coming from NPR, which is basically now a national joke, at least in terms of doing any kind of journalism.
But back to Trump, Debbie's point is, you know, a normal person would retreat from the field.
They'd be like, I've got a great life.
Mar-a-Lago's a lot nicer than the White House.
Why do I actually want, do I need the headache?
What is Trump's motivation?
Is it just that Trump is like, he loves being president and he wants to be president again.
just fun? Is it that is it a vindication?
You know what? I lost the trophy last time.
I was unjustly deprived of it.
I need to win again just to show and vindicate myself.
Is that it? Is it just simple patriotism?
Trump is like, you know what?
I love the country.
And even though I could be sitting on a beach somewhere and just, you know, sipping a cocktail, I'm going to do this because I believe, I honestly believe I can make the country better.
Human motives are often hard to separate out.
But I think the third motive is very clearly present, the latest motive.
The motive of patriotism is driving this man.
The timing.
There are Republicans who think this was, in a way, hasty or ill-timed.
Some sort of slyly suggest, well, maybe he's doing it so that they can't file any charges against him.
I think that Trump's motivation is actually pretty clear.
And it is to get in early, let people know he's running, and you may say, clear the field.
Clear the field. Now, of course, when Trump ran in 2016, it was a A densely populated field.
You remember all those guys standing on the podium?
What were there, like 12 of them, honey?
Was this 15? A bunch of Republican candidates, all kind of...
17, I think. 17, Debbie says.
And then Trump kind of just emerged.
And in this case, it's not going to be like that.
In fact, we sometimes talk about people who...
I want to run for president and really shouldn't.
And I say shouldn't because they're not serious candidates.
They would be just absolutely decimated.
So there may be something in people's ego that goes, I want to run for president, or I want to increase my name visibility by running for president, or I want to offer an alternative to Trumpism.
And the only person really who is mentioned as a serious alternative to Trump is, of course, Ron DeSantis.
And again, we have to wait and see how DeSantis is thinking about all this.
After all, he's just been re-elected governor of Florida.
And so whether he is going to run, to me, is not as obvious as some people think.
But I think, in a way, Trump is saying to DeSantis and to others...
I'm getting in early because I'm going to try and dominate the field so that no one can really effectively run against me.
And now, by itself, some people are saying, and I've seen some of this out there, that Trump needs to make room for the next generation.
The old lion is to make room for the younger lions.
And I don't think anything that Trump is doing contradicts that, because Trump could easily say, in his own defense, say, listen, you know what?
I have a right to run for a second term.
Bush served a second term.
Reagan served a second term.
Clinton served a second term.
Obama served a second term.
My second term would obviously not be sequential.
But nevertheless, this is my right.
And all the other guys who want to kind of come up in the wake of the MAGA movement or Trumpism, they're going to have their chance to do that.
It's not as if DeSantis is like in his 80s and won't have a chance to run later.
So I think Trump's point is that this is his time.
And on that basis, he's jumped into the ring kind of to let everybody know, I'm here.
I'm doing this.
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Discussion of Trump's big announcement, but I also want in this segment to broaden the discussion to look at a sort of a postmortem of what happened in the recent midterms.
Now, a couple of details with regard to Trump.
The first thing is I saw a very interesting statement by Ivanka Trump basically saying, I'm stepping away from politics.
Now, she didn't clearly say that she was doing this along with her husband, Jared Kushner.
She says, quote, And so I think what she's trying to say is that I'm not going to be appearing on campaign rallies with my dad, and I'm also going to stay away if Trump is re-elected from the Trump administration.
And to the degree that she means herself and her husband, Jared Kushner, I think this is a good thing for them, but it's also a very good thing for Trump.
It's a good thing for Trump because it's always complicated when you have a close family that are anchored in a position of great authority and power and trust in the White House.
Everybody else doesn't know how to navigate with regard to them.
Of course, they are trusted, but on the other hand, they're not necessarily experienced.
Now, Jared Kushner in some ways did bring some experience.
He was very well connected in the Middle East.
And his impact, I think, in some ways was positive because he helped to broker important deals, the move of the embassy to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords, where Arab countries made a pact with Israel that would have seemed unimaginable.
In fact, people like John Kerry said it's ridiculous.
You can't get this kind of agreement.
Without the Palestinians and Trump sort of made it look easy.
So I'm not implying that Jared Kushner didn't do anything.
But I also think that what happens very often for a business guy like Kushner is he tends to look at the White House as a way of kind of making connections and setting up business deals with the Saudis and so on.
And in some ways, this is troublingly reminiscent of some of the Hunter Biden arguments.
Now, I'm not equating Jared Kushner with Hunter Biden, but I am saying that leveraging a family name or leveraging your relationship with the president to make business or financial deals, this is unseemly and should not be occurring.
We don't even want to create any appearance of impropriety.
So to my view of thinking, this is all to the good.
Another thing that I'd like to see happen is...
Why? Because, hey, the guy's running for president.
If you have an important candidate running for the Republican nomination, what is sort of the rationale for saying, this guy can't express himself on Twitter?
Now Trump has said, I'm not coming back to Twitter.
He said, I'm going to stay on Truth Social.
That's Trump's decision.
But what I'm saying is that I think that in the name of, if Elon Musk does want Twitter to be a forum for free and open debate, then it doesn't make sense to exclude a major candidate from that kind of participation.
So in my view, that should happen and really should happen now.
Now there's a very interesting article by JD Vance in the American Conservative of all places and it's talking about the midterms.
I want to discuss this article and this segment and the next one, but I'm also going to go beyond the article.
I want to argue that there are two factors that have played a big role in the midterms that we're not focusing on enough.
J.D. Vance focuses on one of them, and I want to focus also on the other.
The two factors are, number one, redistricting, and number two, money.
J.D. Vance focuses on the money factor, but let me talk briefly about redistricting.
Because here you have the Republicans in the midterms getting 5 million more votes than the Democrats.
And normally, if you or I could distribute those votes, we could cause 15 or 20 House races to fall our way and probably 3 or 4 Senate races.
So we would comfortably take the Senate.
We'd have a very nice margin in the House.
So obviously the votes aren't in the right places or aren't falling.
The rain isn't falling, you can almost say, where the plants are.
And why is that?
Well, the answer, quite simply, is redistricting.
The Democrats are drawing districts in such a way, particularly in a lot of the swing states, Places like New Mexico and Nevada, they draw the district in such a way that makes it really difficult for the Republican to win.
Now, this is not to say Republicans don't also do redistricting.
Gerrymandering is kind of a two-way street.
I guess what I'm saying is the Democrats might be just better practitioners of the art.
And it comes back to the idea that the Democrats, in general, are better at the mechanics of elections than Republicans are.
Now, let me turn to this J.D. Vance article, which is interestingly titled, Don't Blame Trump.
And I think what Vance is really saying is that there's a major structural advantage for the Democrats, namely money.
Vance goes on to say that you need money really for two reasons.
One is advertising, which is to say for candidates, for parties to get the message out.
And the second is turnout.
You need a get out the vote operation.
And that costs money.
So money is in fact the kind of lubricating fuel of politics.
And as Vance goes on to argue, the Dems have a whole lot more of it than we do.
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feel the difference. I'm continuing my discussion of JD Vance's article about the money difference between Republicans and Democrats, and JD basically gives a lot of the credit, or maybe the blame, to the Democratic group called ActBlue.
ActBlue is a nationwide fundraising operation that draws on small donors and individual donors, 21 million donors.
They put money into all the key races, and this is how JD Vance says, my opponent, Tim Ryan, could run just non-stop ads about how much he, quote, agreed with Trump, about what a kind of moderate he was, and not wedded to either party.
All of this is funded by this Democratic machine.
John Fetterman, by the way, had the same machine in Pennsylvania.
And Mastroiano could just helplessly look on as these ads pummel the airwaves, radio, TV, online, and so on.
So, J.D. Vance goes on to point out that Republicans do raise money from small donors, but you know what?
There are huge consultant and list-building fees.
And so what he's touching on here is that a lot of the GOP consultants are in the quote business of politics.
They're really in it for themselves.
And so what they do is they say, okay, I'll help you raise money, but out of every dollar, you know what, we'll keep 75 cents, you get 25 cents.
I'm only giving you that as an example.
But it illustrates the point that when a tiny portion of the dollars trickles into the candidate, that obviously creates very limited resources.
J.D. Vance goes on, talks about, he compares the situation with Brian Kemp in Georgia and Ron DeSantis in Florida.
Now, both won. Kemp won for governor and Ron DeSantis won for senator.
But, says J.D. Vance...
You notice that DeSantis' margin was huge.
DeSantis basically wiped the floor with Charlie Crist.
It's a 20-point margin.
And so he goes, why is that?
Is that because DeSantis is like a vastly better candidate than Brian Kemp?
And J.D. Vance goes, well, it may be.
But he goes, but another factor...
Ron DeSantis outraised Charlie Crist 7 to 1.
So this was a case, a rare case, where the money advantage was overwhelmingly on the Republican side, and we were able to use it, despite, by the way, the media making its kind of in-kind contributions to the Democrats.
Nevertheless, DeSantis was able to sort of blow out Charlie Crist.
Now, camp 1... But you know what?
Kemp raised a lot of money, but Stacey Abrams raised even more.
And so that was a race where there was no big money advantage for Kemp.
Kemp won and won kind of cleanly, but didn't win close to the margin that DeSantis did.
J.D. Vance goes on to say that in Ohio, you had candidates.
Some of them were kind of MAGA, Trump indoors.
Some of them were establishment candidates.
And they ran against Democratic incumbents in places that they thought that the Republicans might win.
And he goes, you know what?
Almost all of them lost.
And he goes, why is that?
He goes, that's because incumbents have a huge money advantage.
It's not just that incumbents have the advantage of name recognition.
It is that when you're first raising money, it costs you so much to raise money that you end up with only pennies on the dollar.
It's once you have already developed a big fundraising list, often by running the first time and being successful.
Now you're the incumbent. Now when you raise money, you know who to go to.
And the money goes straight into your pocket.
And you keep 80 or 90 cents on the dollar, if not all of it.
And so you're in a completely different position as someone running against you.
And so the point that Vance is making, I think accurately, is that This was not a difference where the establishment did well and the MAGA guys did badly.
It's not even the reverse.
It is the case where incumbency provided a steady advantage across the board.
So, now, I just saw a very interesting comment from Josh Hawley saying that the old Republican Party is dead.
And this is part of an emerging debate, which I'll talk about in subsequent days and perhaps even weeks.
Between kind of two camps on the right, one of which is arguing the Republican Party needs to recognize that the old system is dead and we need a new Republican Party, perhaps a new magified Republican Party.
And I've said similar things in the past.
But there is a rival point of view which says the exact opposite, that MAGA is the problem and that what we need is kind of, you know, normal republicanism.
We need people kind of more like Mike Pence and Mike DeWine, kind of guys who don't rock the boat, very kind of average guys, but guys that don't freak out people, don't scare them, aren't making outlandish claims, perhaps don't have a kind of big personality like Trump.
Now, I noticed, quite honestly, that when I see advocates of the so-called GOP normalcy on social media, they usually come from people who are themselves dullards.
You know, I'm just saying they come from guys who have, like, 75 followers on Twitter.
They're incredibly boring.
And, see, these are people who, like, they...
Look, I mean, they don't have a following.
They can't get speaking engagements.
No one considers them interesting.
Probably girls don't want to talk to them.
So they're really hoping that a day will come when kind of duller normalcy will be cool.
They're waiting for that. And they're like, yeah, man, we don't really want people who are like hip and like Carrie Lake and, you know, look good and dynamic and make all kinds of interesting things to say.
And we actually want sort of people who don't say much and kind of shuffle from their right foot to the left.
You know, in other words... We're dull, but let's make America boring again.
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Here's a very interesting tweet by Charlie Kirk.
He's writing from Arizona.
Turning Point is based in Arizona.
He's very active in the last days of the Carrie Lake effort and the vote counting, and he was covering this on his podcast.
Quote,"...while Carrie Lake was out campaigning and earning votes, the Democrats in Arizona were ballot capturing and tracking down nail-in ballots.
Politics is no longer about crowds, messaging, or supporters.
It's about machinery and winning the game." Something very interesting is going on here.
What Charlie is basically saying is that, and this goes back to a line in 2000 Mules, Republicans focus on the campaign, Democrats focus on the election.
Now, this is background for a recent message that True the Vote sent out to its supporters and friends, obviously including us.
And I want to convey some of that and comment on it.
Catherine talks first about the fact that I was released from prison last Monday afternoon, having spent the previous seven days behind bars.
She was held in contempt of court, ending in an unprecedented sentence of imprisonment without bond.
Now, think of how stupid this is.
Lock up these two guys.
Don't pose any danger to society.
No bond. You can't even get bail.
Why? Because we want you locked up because the judge was trying to, you may almost say, apply judicial muscle to make them reveal the name of a confidential informant.
Thankfully, an emergency ruling from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Ordered our release.
Now, Catherine and Greg go on to comment on the midterms, I think, in a very interesting way.
They say, look, you've got to realize that what we're facing in the midterms, which we face in 2020, are, quote, deep institutional structures built up over decades that are responsible for the erosion of our freedom.
And they go on to point out a couple of those.
Here's one. The Republican Party has been under a consent decree for 40 years in which it was not allowed to engage in ballot security measures.
Think of how insane it is for the GOP to make this deal, that the Democrats then ruthlessly renewed time after time again.
So for four decades, the Republicans were not able to actively sort of keep an eye on elections.
I don't know.
You know, I see fraud over here.
I see fraud over there. And so a kind of inability to be systematic and legalistic about it, which is how you need to be if you expect courts to pay attention.
The RNC barely lifted a finger to help some of its candidates get over the finish line.
The Democratic Party invests heavily in lawfare and attorneys who file election-related lawsuits all year round.
So we're talking about the fact that the Democrats see legal aggression as a form of electioneering, as a form of ongoing electioneering.
Republicans don't see it that way.
The Democratic Party holds raw political machine power in many cities.
They have huge patronage armies of activists.
Their influence extends into the courts, the media, social media, and corporate America.
So this is actually one reason some people sometimes ask us, hey guys, you know...
Why aren't law enforcement officials and officials who oversee elections jumping to attention in the aftermath of 2,000 meals?
And the answer is the research occurs very often in heavily Democratic areas where there's not a Republican in sight.
It's not just that you've got Democratic activists, Democratic nonprofits, but you've got Companies in those areas that are sympathetic and give money to Democrats.
You've got a local media that covers up for the Democrats.
So it's essentially almost like a kind of, this is like the mafia on Canal Street in the old days.
The mafia controlled Canal Street.
Everyone else was involved in it.
We're paying them off.
And the same is true with the Democratic Party.
Over the past two years, as Catherine, we're exposed and disappointed in the cowardice of state legislatures to exercise their power.
Now, it's really interesting.
I was looking at a list of Republican state legislatures, and we have a lot of them.
And yet, although state legislatures have the constitutional authority to exercise active shaping of the rules and oversight into elections, they often don't pay a whole lot of attention to that.
They pay more attention to other kind of mundane business when this is very important business, which affects not only the state itself, but in a sense, and the aggregate affects the whole country.
So what Catherine and Greg are saying, and this is how they sum it up, they say, look, we have a broken election process, and there's no doubt about that, and anyone who says the contrary is essentially lying or covering up for the cheaters.
But she says, look, the one thing that we do have, and I think she doesn't name 2,000 mules in her note, but it's part of the story, is a widespread public recognition, a widespread awareness among the base of the Republican Party and some, I highlight some, not all, of the leadership that this is a problem that has to be really addressed.
Now, we have two years to address it.
We also have power in the Republican House.
To have hearings on this and push the matter forward through the House itself.
Bring public exposure to what's going on.
So there is an opportunity if we will take it.
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I don't often talk about crypto on the podcast, in part because although I know something about it, I don't feel like I know enough about it.
And I don't, well, Debbie and I don't invest in it.
We try to invest in things we understand.
And we also, I think, both have a sort of belief that this is a little risky.
We don't really know where it's even going.
In principle, of course, I like the idea of having a currency or a form of currency that is liberated from the government, that is untethered to the Federal Reserve.
But I'm here to talk today about this crypto guy, this crypto billionaire, Sam Bankman Freed.
And his rapid fall from grace.
Now, this is a guy who very assiduously cultivated the media.
He's only 30 years old.
He's a 30-year-old billionaire.
And there were all these articles I was seeing from places like Fortune and Forbes.
He's the new Warren Buffett.
He's the new Carnegie.
and I'm thinking, wow, well, didn't Warren Buffett build up his expertise and wisdom painfully over many, many years, if not decades, and isn't the same true of Rockefeller and Carnegie and so many other of the old tycoons? So, and I think the point of these articles was, yeah, well, this guy must be even smarter because he's only 30 and look where he is.
So, in other words, he has figured out a much faster road to success.
Than even some of the old revered names, captains of industry and of finance.
Well, it turns out that this Sam Bankman Freed was running a kind of a Ponzi scheme, it seems, or some have said even a money laundering operation.
And here's the political implications.
He's been running a kind of scheme to the benefit of the Democratic Party.
Now, some could argue, wait a minute, Dinesh, he also did give some money to Republicans, and while that's true, in fact, apparently he gave a little bit of money to McConnell, the vast, vast majority of his contributions have been to Democrats.
There's been some speculation that the reason that he did this was in order to seem cool, like he's giving back to the community.
He's an altruist, so he isn't just all about doing well, but he's also about doing good.
And so he was in a very crafty way, creating this impression of the socially conscious entrepreneur.
And I think probably there is a good deal of truth to that.
This was an image that was important to this guy.
But I think the Democrats also protected him and encouraged him, and in a sense, kept the regulators away from him.
Why?
Because this was a guy who was essentially moving money around in very dubious ways.
And, um, and the money that's not his money, by the way.
It's investor money.
So that what happens is that when the money suddenly freezes, you can't pay it back, then you have what happened with Bernie Madoff, which is you essentially have a kind of meltdown in which all these investors lose a whole bunch of money.
And now this stuff is supposed to be...
Then there's supposed to be some governmental oversight.
And the point I'm trying to make is it seems like in this case the oversight was missing.
Why? Well, let's look at why.
This guy, Sam Bankman-Fried, sometimes called SBF, funnels $865,000 to the Democratic National Committee, $1 million to Chuck Schumer's Senate Majority PAC, $6 million to the House Majority PAC. This guy was a major funder of Biden's 2020 campaign.
He gave money, $5 million, to the Future Forward PAC, which was very actively involved in the Biden race.
This is a guy whose lobbyists are frequently seen at the White House, multiple meetings with Biden.
This is a guy who gave $40 million to the Democrats during the 2022 midterm cycle.
He was one of the biggest donors to the Democrats.
In fact, this money probably was instrumental.
And I talked earlier about the influence of money when I was discussing J.D. Vance's article helped to stave off a Republican wave in the midterms.
So let's look at it. $250,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, $66,500 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, $400,000 to the Democratic Grassroots Victory Fund, and the story goes on.
Now this guy, SPF, is hiding somewhere in the Bahamas.
He apparently lives there, but there's been calls to have the guy extradited, brought back to the United States for investigations and for questioning.
I saw a very interesting item, which I'm simply going to mention, that this guy, SBF, and his company, FTX, is also responsible for a sort of a weird money laundering scheme in which the Democrats appropriate money for the Ukraine.
The Ukrainians turn around and invest in crypto.
So they turn around and put money into FTX and then Sam Bankman-Free takes the FTX money and gives it back to the Democrats.
Now, this needs to be investigated further, but if true, it would mean the Democrats are pretending to fund a Ukraine war and getting, in a sense, through FTX kickbacks This would be highly unethical, perhaps even criminal and unsurprising because after all this is what Democrats do.
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Do it today. This theory predicts that as the world becomes more developed, more technological, more educated, more sophisticated, it will become more secular, less religious.
Peter Berger, the sociologist, puts it pretty well, and with a note of irony, he says that the most confident exponents of secularization believe that, quote, eventually Iranian mullahs, Pentecostal preachers, Tibetan lamas will all think and act like professors of literature at American universities.
Now, this thesis was advanced so confidently that kind of most people sort of accepted it.
In other words, secular people thought, wow, things are going our way, and religious people thought, wow, things are going their way.
But as it turns out, this is not true.
And what we have seen is a, well, some people call it a backlash against secularization, but of course this raises the question, what causes this backlash?
Is it the case that secularization is not meeting some very basic human needs?
And this notion that secularism would replace needs that were previously met by religion is turning out not to be the case.
Now, secularization is fairly far advanced in Europe.
Václav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, said that Europe is, quote, the first atheist civilization in the history of mankind.
Now, I don't think he meant by this that Europe is full of atheists.
In fact, when there are surveys, you find out that the number of atheists in most European countries hovers around 5%, maybe 8%.
And so the atheists are outnumbered by the religious people, but the largest group kind of falls in the middle.
You could call them sort of nominal Christians or Christians who don't really follow Christian beliefs or teachings.
And so we come back to the concept I introduced earlier, which is the concept of practical atheism.
In Europe, there's some variety.
Countries like Poland, for example, are far more religious.
Ireland as well than countries like France or Germany.
The sociologists Pippa Norris and Ron Engelhardt say...
That the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before, and they constitute a growing proportion of the world's population.
So the West is becoming more secular.
The world is becoming more religious.
And what this really means is that a lot of developing non-Western cultures are resisting secularism.
One of the phrases that you sometimes hear is modernization without westernization.
And what that means is that these cultures want technology, they want prosperity, they want development, but they identify the West with secularism and also, by the way, with progressivism and liberalism.
Some people think that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world.
And as it turns out, this is not true.
Islam is the second fastest growing religion in the world.
The fastest is Christianity.
But it's not simply a matter of who's growing the fastest.
It's also a matter of how...
They are growing. Islam grows mainly through multiplication.
In other words, Islam grows through reproduction.
Muslims, by and large, have larger families than non-Muslims, and so the Islamic population grows that way.
Christianity is growing mainly through conversion.
People who are not Christian are coming into the Christian fold.
So that's an important difference.
And the other point is that Christianity has now truly become a universal religion.
Let's remember that Christianity has baked into it a kind of universalism.
Think of Israel, ancient Israel and ancient Judaism.
Ancient Judaism was for the Jews.
It was a kind of tribal religion.
But from the beginning, it's very clear that Christ talks about coming for all mankind.
And so, in a sense, you could say that what Jesus did was he universalized the propositions of the Old Testament.
Well, even though Jesus did that, Christianity was not, in fact, a global religion.
It started out, of course, in the so-called, what we now call the Middle East.
It spread through Europe.
It was carried by the Roman legions on the back of the Roman Empire, so it spread really...
But it became a European faith.
For many, many centuries.
And then starting in the Counter-Reformation, 16th, 17th centuries, you began to see missionaries go to Asia, to Japan, so that the faith became more far-flung.
It began to find its way into other parts of the world, but it still wasn't anchored there.
You couldn't realistically say that there was a kind of powerful Christianity in places like Japan or China or India, let alone Africa or later South America.
But today, that is the case.
Today, you find that there are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Christians in places like China and India.
And so, you can truly speak of Christianity now as being universal.
And that is not true of any other religion.
Other religions are, by and large, regional.
I'm not saying you can't find any followers around the world, but what I'm saying is that they are usually anchored in one place, and then they've got limited or kind of thinned out followers elsewhere.
Think for example about Buddhism.
It was founded in India.
Now there's actually not a whole lot of Buddhism left in India, but there is Buddhism in Southeast Asia and there are a few Buddhists as a kind of, you'll find a few guys in France and a few guys in America.
I'm a Buddhist.
But by and large, Buddhism is not universal.
Islam as well.
Islam is very strong in certain parts of the world, strong in the Middle East, strong in Turkey, strong in Indonesia.
And there are of course, Islamic populations in Europe and America, but Islam is not a universal religion in the same sense that Christianity is.
And so what we're seeing is this kind of great global shift.
And the historian Philip Jenkins calls it sort of the browning of Christianity.
In other words, Christianity is becoming not only more universal, but it's becoming sort of darker skinned.
And I'll pick this up in the next segment.
What the world is seeing today is the browning of Christianity.
And by this I mean Christianity is becoming less white, less European, and it's now more seen In the countries of Asia and Africa and South America, so that the overall complexion of Christianity is, well, multiracial is a good way to put it.
The Browning is simply a kind of description of that.
If we want to visualize a typical contemporary Christian, this is the historian Philip Jenkins writing in his book called The Next Christendom.
Quote, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela.
He goes on to argue that the vital centers of Christianity are no longer Geneva or Rome or Paris or London.
It's now Buenos Aires, Manila, Kinshasa, Addis Ababa.
The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning.
By Southern Christianity, he's really referring to the more tropical, let's call it the darker skinned countries of the world.
If we go back a century or so, more than 80% of the Christians lived in Europe and America.
And today, 60% of all Christians worldwide live in the developing world.
And this is kind of interesting because all of this happened, not because...
Some people say, well, yeah, there's no surprise to Nashville.
That's due to colonialism.
The European powers impose their will on these other cultures.
But in fact, it's probably more accurate to say that the opposite is the case.
While there was colonialism, while the British ruled India, for example, the number of Christians in India was very small.
In fact, many of them had been, as my family was going back many generations, converts from the Portuguese who occupied a very tiny part of India.
The British, by and large, did not convert people.
So, interestingly, what's happened is Christianity has spread in Europe and I'm sorry, not in Europe, in Asia and in Africa and in South America, by and large as the European colonial powers have withdrawn.
This is a post-colonial development.
One of the things I found really striking in Philip Jenkins' work is that he talks about the fact that the new Christianity, this so-called Southern Christianity, as he calls it, is really anchored in the world of the Bible.
And now you can say, well, isn't all of Christianity anchored in the world of the Bible?
Don't preachers every Sunday, kind of everywhere, talk about the stories in the Bible?
Yeah, they do. But, you know, if you or I sit in church and we listen to a biblical account of From the Old Testament, the book of Job.
It's a world that's a little unfamiliar to us, isn't it?
It's a world of, first of all, it's pastoral life, it's agricultural, it's a world of donkeys and cattle and...
And also evil spirits.
And it's a world that is far removed sociologically from the life that you or I live, whether in urban or in rural or suburban America.
But, says Philip Jenkins, for people who live in places like Bombay, think of it the world sort of a slumdog millionaire, the world of the Bible is like right here.
Yeah, that's the world I live in.
I totally get it.
It's a world of hardship, of poverty, of moneylenders, of lepers.
And so this, the biblical world feels real to people who are living in the developing world.
I remember many, many years ago, there was a pastor from Africa who came to a church that I then attended in Northern Virginia, and he was talking about all these miracles that were occurring regularly in his church.
And one of the assistant pastors in the church I was going to looked a little bit doubtful, wasn't totally skeptical, but kind of like, really?
And the African pastor turned over to him and basically said, you know young man, there's a little bit of a difference between you and me.
You see this book over here?
The Bible? He goes, we believe it.
In other words, what he was saying is that there is no reason to believe that the miracles described in the Bible suddenly comes to a rapid halt, and that ended with the world of Jesus, and none of that ever happens again anymore, as if God's powers have suddenly become very limited, or God has just decided to go into a different line of work.
I think the meaning of all this is that there is, even in modernization, even in modernity, a need for a spiritual anchoring, a sort of spiritual line to the supernatural, a connection with God that doesn't really go away.
It's almost as if God has planted in us this kind of restlessness, this kind of anxiety, so that whether we live in ancient Israel, whether we live even in remote cultures far away from Christianity, whether we live in the 5th century AD or today, the need for God, the desire to learn about God and this quest for the supernatural remains a feature of human existence.
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